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Microsoft Office 2003 Introduction

Welcome to Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, part of Microsoft Office 2003 Editions—the easiest way to help more people use information to make a positive impact on business. The Office 2003 Editions offer new technologies and features while improving upon existing and familiar tools to facilitate effective and efficient collaboration and information sharing.

This document delivers an overview of Office 2003 Editions, including how they can help you connect people and information as well as get valuable online Help services. We take a close look at Outlook 2003 in action, providing guidance on the specific details of this integral part of Office 2003 Editions.

Through integration with Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services, the Office 2003 Editions offer advances in intranet collaboration to help users gain access to and share information both internally and externally. Support for Information Rights Management (IRM) and industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a platform on which to build cost-effective solutions that can have an immediate, positive impact. In addition, the Office 2003 Editions offer new ways to organize and manage e-mail and make more use out of the workday.

With a focus on connecting people, information, and business processes, the design goals integrate collaboration, usability, and information management.

Connect people

Designed to integrate with intranet technologies such as Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, the Office 2003 Editions provide new ways to connect individuals, teams, and organizations. By incorporating the new tools with familiar Microsoft Office menus, functions, and interfaces, training and implementation time is minimized. Workers can collaborate from any location by using shared information and review processes that include the following features:

New! Shared Attachment option offers an automatic way of creating document workspaces through e-mail messages, when sending attachments for review. Document workspaces provide a forum for managing projects, including collaborative review –with features such as automatic updates to the most current version and the ability to share documents and other relevant information in real time.

New! Meeting Workspace option automatically creates workspaces through Outlook invitations. Meeting Workspaces help enhance the productivity of meetings by providing a place to coordinate schedules, disseminate materials, and store notes and minutes.

Improved! Contacts and Calendars can be shared easily among team members and viewed side by side to facilitate meeting coordination and scheduling.

New! Information Rights Management (IRM)functionality protects sensitive information from unauthorized distribution or alteration, and allows companies to set and enforce policies that help control how their data is used.

The Office 2003 Editions are designed to make it easier for people to manage an ever-increasing volume of business information. Improvements and new features in Outlook 2003 enable users to organize and prioritize e-mail messages quickly and easily, and new security settings offer increased support for junk e-mail filtering. Support for remote and mobile workers includes improvements to connectivity performance, such as better caching, and shared calendars. Obtaining information from a variety of locations is made easier with organizational tools, such as the Research task pane. The following are new and improved features for connecting information:

New! Mail View, Reading and Navigation panesin Outlook 2003 work together to give users a more comprehensive, organized view of their e-mail messages, with more efficient use of screen space.

New! Outlook 2003 Search Folders provide an easy, automated way to organize e-mail messages without physically moving them. Users can create customized Search Folders based on their business needs.

Improved! Enhanced Rules and Alerts provide automated organization of incoming e-mail messages, in addition to automatic notifications so that users can stay current with incoming e-mail messages without spending extra time doing so. Alerts can also be integrated with document workspaces to notify users about important project developments.

Often, critical business information is kept separate from the programs that workers know

and use. With its extensive support for industry-standard XML, the Office 2003 Editions help bring business processes and information together on the desktop. To facilitate greater efficiency, features such as Smart Documents and Programmable task panes help users share customizable, task-specific information easily. New and improved tools for connecting business processes include the following features:

New! Smart Documents bring relevant information directly to the task at hand through a new Programmable task pane user interface. With Smart Documents, XML solutions can be created to enable business processes, help users complete forms and other documents, and then link that information to back-end systems that support XML. As the user clicks through the document, the program is modified to present the appropriate functions to complete the task.

New! Extensible Smart Tag support is now offered in all of the Office programs, including PowerPoint 2003, Outlook 2003, and Access 2003. Support includes automatic configuration capabilities such as formatting and populating an index at the end of an article.

Microsoft Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later; or Windows XP or later

Super VGA (800 × 600) or a higher-resolution monitor

128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or more

Hard disk usage will vary depending on configuration; custom installation choices may require more or less hard disk space. The following are the hard disk requirements for individual Office 2003 Editions.

This section examined the design goals, system recommendations, and additional services of Office 2003 Editions. The next two sections take a deeper look at Office 2003 Editions and how they facilitate connecting people and connecting information, focusing on Outlook 2003.

Introduction

Every employee faces challenges when a project requires team collaboration. The Microsoft Office 2003 Editions and the integration with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provides a platform that includes programs employees use daily to work with team members in a centralized location, making the team’s work more effective and efficient.

The Office 2003 Editions allow for closer teamwork experience. New task panes from within the documents and e-mail messages provide information about other team members and also offer access to resources. Team members can use Instant Messenger (IM) integration to see when other team members are online or offline. New calendar features in Microsoft Outlook 2003 make scheduling meetings with other team members quicker and more effective. Office 2003 Editions also offer content protection rights to authors, ensuring they have complete access to and control over their documents.

The integration of Office 2003 Editions programs and WSS offers users tools that are powerful, easy to use, and make collaboration easier. A WSS site provides a virtual community for team collaboration—making it easy for users to work together on documents, projects, events, and other activities where information sharing is essential.

In addition to the new workspaces, Outlook 2003 offers a workgroup server, offline availability, and multiple calendar views and lists. Microsoft Office Access 2003 has features that allow users to link tables to other SharePoint Web sites and preserve full read/write capabilities. Because Excel 2003 and the various SharePoint lists are integrated more closely, a user can import or export a list to or from Excel and share it with other team members. The Office 2003 Editions program and WSS integration gives users more opportunities for increased accessibility to view, edit, read, or write information within Outlook, Access, and Excel.

Windows SharePoint Services and Outlook 2003

With Office 2003 Editions, data from WSS can be used from directly within Outlook, allowing users to make better use of team information by integrating it with their own. Outlook 2003 provides users with team calendars to centralize team-specific appointments. It also provides specialized alerts to notify team members about any changes made to shared documents, and other benefits, such as workgroup servers, offline availability, and SharePoint capabilities.

Team calendars

Team calendars allow teams to post their schedules of product reviews on a SharePoint site for the whole team to reference. Team members can check that schedule against their own by opening up the live calendar view of a SharePoint list side by side with their individual Outlook calendars. Events from a SharePoint list look and act just like Outlook appointments and can be dragged and dropped from the SharePoint calendar into each user’s Outlook calendar.

Specialized alerts

Specialized alerts can help workers be more effective by providing relevant information that keeps them up to date. Users can view alerts by clicking Alert Me links in any SharePoint Web site, or by selecting Rules and Alerts from the Tools menu in Outlook, and then clicking the Manage Alerts tab.

Alerts can be used to notify users of changes to documents, list items, document libraries, lists, surveys, or even search results by sending e-mail notifications. In addition, users can easily set up rules to move alert e-mail messages to folders and can view all active alerts in Outlook by using the Rules and Alerts dialog box. From there, users can delete the alert, jump directly to the Web site, create rules to act on the alerts, and more.

By selecting the options that best meet their needs, users can customize the alerts they receive and stay up to date on the status of a shared document.

Other benefits

Other benefits of tight integration between WSS and Outlook 2003 include:

Workgroup server. Small businesses can use WSS as a small workgroup server that enables shared contacts and calendars without having an Exchange Server.

Offline availability. Data from WSS is cached on the local computer so that it can be taken offline. These calendar and contact lists can be viewed even when the SharePoint site is unavailable, such as when the user is on an airplane.

SharePoint in Outlook 2003. Outlook users can open calendar lists, event lists, and contact lists within the Outlook user interface as a read-only source of data. The data from WSS looks and acts just like native Outlook calendars and contact lists; and calendars can be opened side by side.

Shared lists

Users of WSS benefit from the enhanced ability of Office 2003 Editions to work with SharePoint lists. Each enhancement to the list experience in WSS enables a range of scenarios not previously available. The enhancements also provide the ability to combine SharePoint lists with the rich functionality of core Office programs, opening new possibilities for collaboration, data collection, and analysis.

New! Grid view. This new view style is similar to the grid display style in Excel 2003 and brings Excel-like functionality to WSS with functions such as Calculation Formulas, AutoFill, AutoComplete, Sorting, and Filtering.

New! Multiple-user list collaboration. Multiple users can now edit the same list at the same time. If WSS detects any conflicts, it presents conflict-resolution options.

Improved! Easy editing. Users can drag and drop to rearrange rows and columns or move data inside a list.

Improved! Office program integration. Users can now have the best of both worlds, using Office programs to work with SharePoint lists.

New lists. New lists include Photo Library, which offers options for storing and viewing pictures, and Business Document Libraries, which enable XML solution authoring, editing, and storage in the team site.

Improved lists. Improvements to the existing lists include options for scheduling re-occurring meetings in event lists, and new security settings that allow delegation of permissions to a peer-list level.

The following table shows WSS integration features for each program in Office 2003 Editions.

One of the ways to make a project successful is to ensure that all team members stay current with personal and team schedules. The Office 2003 programs and WSS integration offer users instant messaging capabilities while working within Outlook 2003 or with a document. Team members can also view personal and team calendars and contacts side by side, so scheduling meetings and tracking down references is more efficient.

Instant messaging integration and presence integration

Instant messaging (IM) technology is integrated with Office 2003 programs to provide instantaneous presence information and the ability to initiate conversations quickly from within documents or Outlook.

Team calendar views

When a user is viewing multiple calendars, correlations between appointments can be difficult to understand. Outlook 2003 offers color-coded team appointments within each team member’s calendar so that the user can distinguish between team appointments and other appointments.